Crystal Lake - Part III

Strange things are afoot in Crystal Lake.

An important location in Friday the 13th mythology is introduced early in the third episode of the prequel series Crystal Lake: the dilapidated shack in the woods that serves as the hideout for slasher Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2. Here, we’re shown that Jason (Callum Vinson) was a child when he stumbled across the shack while playing in the forest with his friend Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom). A wannabe survivalist, Jason was excited to set up the shack – which sits on abandoned property that may have once belonged to bootleggers – as  his forest “stronghold.”

At some point while he was moving around in the woods, Jason managed to get a bloody gash on his arm without even noticing it. As he explains, “I’m pretty tough.”

Jump ahead to several months after Jason drowned and disappeared at Camp Crystal Lake, and Grace is shown waking up in the shack with a blanket thrown over her. It seems Jason took care of her after she stumbled away from her disastrous attempt to join a high school party in the previous episode – but she clearly has no idea that Jason is alive and lurking around, watching her from the trees.

In town, Officer Dorf (Cameron Scoggins) is trying to set up a date with local woman Rita (Joy Suprano), but he’s more successful at getting the townsfolk riled up about a supposed bear attack that happened out in the woods. Dorf wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about the bear-chewed human remains that he and Chief of Police Levon Brooks (William Catlett) found out in the woods, but he’s got a big mouth, and soon there’s a bear-hunting posse being formed, with members including buddies Enos (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Gus (William Hill), as well as Dorf’s own racist father Hamish (Neal Huff), who thinks his son should be the Chief in this town. Brooks tries to get the men to abandon their bear-hunting plans, but they don’t pay him any attention.

Someone else who warns them is the “local crazy,” Ralph (Nick Cordileone), who says the men will find nothing out in the woods but death. Ralph actually lives in the woods and knows there’s something strange going out there. He has said there’s worse things in the woods than bears. And he’s not just talking about the dead soldiers this traumatized veteran sees lying around as he makes his way through the forest. He knows there’s a mysterious, barefoot person lurking around his property – and in one scene, which brings to mind the beginning of Friday the 13th Part III, this mysterious person (Jason, of course) even steals some items off his clothesline.

Brooks has plenty to do in this episode. He also helps Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) box up Jason’s toys so she can stick her supposedly late son’s belongings in storage – and, surprisingly, they find a “skin mag” hidden away in Jason’s room. He has another in a series of heartfelt talks with Pamela. Having found a busted piece of scissors in that bear-chewed corpse, he now gets directed to another piece of the puzzle of what happened back in the first episode: a rental car connected to the deceased is found abandoned in nearby Middlesex County, with blood in the trunk. After learning that the person who rented the car used a fake name and a credit card issued to a non-existent company called Subsun Solutions, he asks his journalist sister Briana (Devin Kessler), who feels she’s wasting her time writing articles on things like 400-pound pumpkins and new Burger King sandwiches, to look into the situation for him. Little does he know, if he solves this case he’ll find out that his good friend Pam is a murderer.

High schooler Claudette (Danielle Kotch), the inattentive camp counselor partially responsible for Jason’s drowning, thinks Grace busted a window in her boyfriend’s car with a shoe the previous night (it was actually Jason’s doing), so the girls have a school restroom brawl that results in Grace’s alcoholic single mother Valerie (Tonya Glanz) being called in to pick up the kid.

Lunch lady Pam is reeling from the news of the bear-chewed corpse (since she fed the corpse to the bear) when she sees Valerie being unnecessarily tough on her daughter as they leave the school. So, while Valerie is out, Pam visits Grace at their apartment in an attempt to brighten the kid’s day. Problem is, Pam sticks around too long, and Valerie doesn’t take kindly to finding her in her home when she gets back.

Pam leaves, as she’s told to. But when she sees a cigarette burn on Grace’s arm, she decides to visit Valerie after hours at her place of work, the Bronco Beef Pit restaurant. Pam is so protective of Grace, and reacts so poorly to Valerie’s abrasive attitude, that she ends up killing the woman and setting the restaurant on fire. Things might have gone differently if Pam knew that Grace burns herself with cigarettes; that wound wasn’t her mother’s doing. But now Pam has not only killed someone to defend herself, as she did in the first episode. Now she has killed someone out of anger, taking another step toward becoming the insane, homicidal woman we know from the original Friday the 13th.

But what about her son, Jason, who has made the strange decision not to let his mother know that he’s alive, even though he sneaks back to their home to grab one of his toys (an “atomic ray gun”) out of storage? Enos gets a blurred look at him while he’s out in the woods… unfortunately, right after being shot in the neck by his buddy Gus, so he’s not exactly in good enough condition to understand what he’s looking at.

I have never seen anything else directed by Michael Lennox, who seems to be best known for directing 19 episodes of a teen sitcom called Derry Girls, but he did a great job directing the first three episodes of Crystal Lake (working from a teleplay by Jen Silverman, who shares story credit with Pia Wilson, on this particular episode), taking us back into the Friday the 13th franchise in a way that feels in line with its roots. He passed the baton with this one, so we’ll see how other directors do from this point on.